Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Home Economics - Challenge of Home Economics [PAGE 32]

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of university women who are to become, not teachers or professionals of any kind, but the heads of American homes. To achieve this double purpose has been the great ambition of the department^ in which it has eminently succeeded." During her first year on the faculty of the University of Illinois, Miss Bevier in addressing the Farmers' Institute at Jacksonville, defined the position of household science in a university as follows: "To provide a place and an opportunity for the correlation and application of the arts and sciences to the home. I know of no one place which affords so many opportunities for these applications. Neither do I know of a place more fateful for good or evil in the life of the individual or the nation than the home. As the equipment and advantages of the University greatly exceed those of any single college, so are the opportunities for the household science department greatly multiplied. . . . "The College of Science can reveal to the students some of the mysteries of the laws of life. The College of Liberal Arts can give them a better conception of their own place and work in the world by the study of the history and literature of other peoples and tongues. The eye can be trained to recognize beauty of color and outline^ and the hand to express it in constructing and adorning the house beautiful." Again in 1918 she wrote: "Home Economics has a chance to teach something of the beauty of life and the unity of life, to teach that there is an art in a well-ordered home and a well-ordered life; and that perhaps is the greatest thing that home economics has to do." And her biographer, Miss Lita Bane, writes of her: "She was consistently unwilling to offer college courses devoted almost entirely to skills, unwilling to mortgage the students' time with specialized home economics subjects to the point where courses in history, economics, literature, and art were crowded out. She stood for a liberal college course with a major only in home economics." Confronted with today's incomparable facilities for the cultural enrichment of family life, home economics should embrace more fully the liberal arts in the preparation not only of future homemakers but teachers of home economics and home demonstration agents as well. The quality of a home today might well be gauged by whether the television set is tuned to Elvis the Pelvis or the American premiere of Prokofiev's opera "War and Peace." The reading materials that

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